Abstract

Experiments and computations were performed to study factors affecting thermal safety when high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) beams are normally incident (i.e., beam axis normal to the interface) upon a bone/soft-tissue interface. In particular, the temperature rise and thermal dose were determined as a function of separation between the beam focus and the interface. Under conditions representative of clinical HIFU procedures, it was found that the thermal dose at the bone surface can exceed the threshold for necrosis even when the beam focus is more than 4 cm from the bone. Experiments showed that reflection of the HIFU beam from the bone back into the transducer introduced temperature fluctuations of as much as ±15% and may be an important consideration for safety analyses at sufficiently high acoustic power. The applicability of linear propagation models in predicting thermal dose near the interface was also addressed. Linear models, while underpredicting thermal dose at the focus, provided a conservative (slight overprediction) estimate of thermal dose at the bone surface. Finally, temperature rise due to absorption of shear waves generated by the HIFU beam in the bone was computed. Modeling shear-wave propagation in the thermal analysis showed that the predicted temperature rise off axis was as much as 30% higher when absorption of shear waves is included, indicating that enhanced heating due to shear-wave absorption is potentially important, even for normally incident HIFU beams.

Received 26 March 2009Revised 01 October 2009Accepted 02 October 2009Published online 05 January 2010

Acknowledgments:

The authors are grateful to Yunbo Liu for measuring the properties of the bone and TMM. They also wish to thank Subha Maruvada, Gerald Harris, and Bruce Herman for helpful discussions on back reflection and thermocouple artifacts.